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Susan Shup is an American artist based in Paris. She mixes personal historical elements with those of art and pop culture, like Rock music and television, to create her witty and vibrant paintings and drawings. Shup’s art has been featured in numerous international publications and has been included in many prestigious private and corporate collections. “My work is a kind of ‘painting out loud’. I’ve always written and kept drawing journals and I use this content as iconography. Music, especially Rock, is an important part of my life in the studio, and I like to not only record sound as spoken-word poetry but also to transcribe it directly with paint onto canvas, usually directly from the tube. I use language in my painting in a dada-like “out of context” way, where the words are often treated abstractly rather than as a narrative; it’s about the sound: DA…DA. But I like telling stories in some of the paintings, and they’re usually stories about artists, or words referencing particular events. The pop content of some of my work allows me the balance needed to work every day, to render as user-friendly what is essentially serious: painting.”